Hi

We keep track of a lot of stats for CR4 but we don't report anything with the kind of detail you describe. There are definite regualr patterns to traffic, but they are the kind of thing you would expect (week days has more traffic than weekends, for example).

Some particular stories do bring in atypical traffic. You can see for yourself by looking at the "All Threads" (or "All Blog Entries") pages from the home page, and then sorting by "Views".

Thanks
- Mark

I'm surprised at this answer on two counts: 1) I expect there are some tools or services that can be found on the WWW that would make knowing this detail quite simple and practically automatic. 2) Cycles, time and traffic seem to me to be basic to certain types of engineering, (I'm not an engineer myself.) i.e. in underderstanding peak expected loads, in particular rates of traffic, and then through some sort of user efforts the self-serving modification of behavior to use a facility when it's not crowded. For instance, I wish they'd do this at each subway station. (I'm in New York City.) Perhaps on major roadways this info would also be of interest. And, at my local usually crowded small city supermarket, and perhaps most of all at the Post Office branch near me - remember again, this is a high density urban situation. (More than 60,000 people living in less than a square mile, Zip 10023.) I would think, for instance, suburban shopping centers would be able to reduce the size of their parking lots, if society were use to "inducing" the spread of the load of traffic thru providing more information. There's also the potential of causing this shift, thru pricing even just 3 or 4% (discounting for coming at low traffic times) , for instance time of day. This use to determine rates of telephone charges. For myself, I go regularly to the movies just before noon on Saturdays, because no matter how popular even for a first release movie, there's never a line. If it starts before noon on the weekend-days it's $6.00, rather than $11.00 at all other times. Having this detailed information, might serve as a sample, and example, that might cause engineering to benefit from awareness of time, a bit more credible, and believable, especially with state of the art 3D graphs or charts. How about it ?

Those sound like examples where a place being crowded or a service being busy is something a person would notice and would care about, or where the operator of the service or place could do things to try to change people's behavior.

We can't control when traffic comes to our site (and don't really care when it comes) and "all" we need to do is handle peak loads efficiently, which we do pretty well. (And if we didn't handle loads well enough the answer wouldn't be to get people to come at a different time. Our real metric is server performance and we monitor that all of the time.)

That said, we do keep pretty much all of the raw data that would go into detailed traffic analysis and on occasion I check it out as part of other inquiries.

Thanks
- Mark